PRESS BRIEFING BY UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT
Press Briefing
PRESS BRIEFING BY UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT
19960917
FOR INFORMATION OF UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT ONLY
At a meeting for correspondents yesterday, Joseph E. Connor, Under- Secretary-General for Administration and Management and Chairman of the United Nations Efficiency Board presented "UN21: Better Service, Better Value, Better Management", the progress report of the Efficiency Board, following its presentation to Permanent Representatives by the Secretary-General and Mr. Connor.
Mr. Connor described the presentation earlier in the day as an experiment in which Permanent Representatives in New York, Geneva and Vienna had participated in a three-way video-conference hook-up with the Secretary- General and with Mr. Connor, in his capacity as Chairman of the Board. It had been "a first" he said. In a further experiment, the conference had taken place with simultaneous remote interpretation. At the recent Cairo Conference, documents had been translated in Vienna, but remote translation was technologically harder. As he spoke, real-time interpretation took place in Geneva and in Vienna. The point, he said, was that people didn't have to be at the same location. The work of the skilled United Nations interpreters was about to enjoy an advance in technology.
The report of the Efficiency Board was not a collection of recommendations, but a report of work either already implemented or under way. Results had been achieved. Improved programmes and services were being delivered within budget. The talent of the United Nations had been motivated and harnessed. Efficiency was a process, he said, and not an event. It was a process that had not been completed. There needed to be a move from administering the United Nations to managing the United Nations. Those were simple words, but represented big changes. It was important to remember that efficiency would result from Member States and the Secretariat working together.
The Efficiency Board had focused on those activities that the Secretary- General could undertake without additional authority, he said. The focus had been on how the Secretariat did things, not on what it did. The report had drawn on the participation of both United Nations managers and staff, he said. The process had begun in February, with efficiency reviews being undertaken by staff at all levels. A wide range of proposals had been received, including some 200 ideas from the Vienna office alone. Describing that process one staff member had commented, "No one had ever asked us before". That told the whole story, Mr. Connor said. In March, the Board received initial findings and in June, the final report was presented to the Board. Since then, the Board had met for several hours with the Secretary-General.
Several different Member States had made personnel and financial resources available to the Board. Its work had placed no burden whatever on the budget. Member States offered their experience to the Board and gave it the challenge to "spend less but do more". The Board had agreed, and the common strategy was to reduce the size of their public sector, improve performance and management, and use information technology more effectively. The report of the Efficiency Board was about management of the Secretariat, Mr. Connor continued. It did not address restructuring and reorganization, inter-governmental reform, programmes and funds, nor the elimination of mandates.
Summarizing the results of the process, Mr. Connor said that managers were asked to meet a $100 million reduction in the 1996-97 proposed budget, and to cut an additional $154 million to meet the budget adopted by the General Assembly. They had reduced spending to remain within the $2.608 billion budget appropriation. They were asked to reduce staff levels to achieve savings and mandated efficiency rates; they brought staff numbers down to 9,121, leaving 900 posts unfilled. They were asked to protect the delivery of mandated programmes and to enhance efficiency; they kept mandated programmes on track and initiated 400 efficiency projects.
Of 400 efficiency projects identified, he said, 23 per cent had been implemented, and 77 per cent were under way. The financial benefits of the effort were that the Organization would stay within the $2.608 billion budget appropriation with a 10 per cent reduction in staff levels, efficiency savings, increased productivity and cuts in other costs. The work of the Efficiency Board was not merely an exercise in cost-cutting, he stressed. The goal was to keep the budget down while providing better service, better value and better management.
Mr. Connor said that on Thursday (19 September) the Organization would initiate its new Home Page on the Internet. That new, more transparent resource, by December, would contain some 270,000 United Nations documents in all languages. It was a quantum leap in access to information. The Home Page was available to diplomatic missions in 157 countries. The United Nations was receiving some 200,000 requests for information each week, he said. Of the 400 efficiency projects under way, 25 per cent were in human resources and 15 per cent were in the field of information technology. Other fields also had long lists of projects.
Several new efficiency approaches were being undertaken at the United Nations office in Geneva, he said. They had absorbed all their mandated budget reductions by the efficiency process. Functions had been merged, such as the mail and messenger units. They "out-sourced" maintenance and achieved gains through office automation and telecommunications. In conference services, they had taken a collaborative approach to document reduction and storage practices were being revised for an estimated saving of $2 million. They had used the optical disk to replace internal distribution of documents.
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Not to be outdone, the United Nations office in Vienna had completed 51 out of the 200 projects recommended by staff. Contracts had been renegotiated, air fares had been reduced by 13 per cent. In some instances, the changes were small, but there were also some large-scale savings. A renegotiated cleaning contract had saved $150,000 per annum. The bottom line was a total of $3 million in administrative savings.
Remote translation could bring about substantial savings, Mr. Connor said. The Efficiency Board estimated that the translation services at the recent Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing would have cost $543,000, but had been provided using remote translation for only $165,000 -- a savings of $33,000 to the United Nations, $345,000 to Governments for a $378,000 total savings.
The Efficiency Board had tackled the "too much paper" problem, he said, through reductions in documentation. The changes included the use of unedited transcripts in Vienna for a savings of $695,000. The Department of Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development was using electronic documentation to facilitate document preparation. Also, they used the Internet for peer review, improving the quality of their work through collaboration. Staggering the work shifts for translation and production in New York had achieved $800,000 in savings. The United Nations wanted to get out of the paper dissemination business, substantially reducing the quantity of paper for savings of up to $3 million per biennium in Geneva. There had been a 27 per cent reduction in the volume of documents in New York during the first half of 1996. Processes were being simplified throughout the Organization, he said. The time required to recruit staff was being cut from 25 weeks to 10-13 weeks.
He had been amazed to see that the United Nations owned some 11,000 vehicles on missions. They represented 900 different makes and models. If the Organization could increase standardization it could save $2,500 for each vehicle. If it standardized on 4,000, therefore, it could save $10 million. Another example of savings was in the area of currency transactions. "We're good at buying large quantities of Swiss francs", he said. But the Organization was not so efficient when it purchased other currencies in smaller amounts of less than $250,000. By buying in small amounts, the Organization was paying some seven per cent of the value of the currency. They had consolidated that process, saving $1.8 million. Even small adjustments helped achieve savings and increase services, he said. The Organization had altered the schedules of its medical unit, cutting overtime by 50 per cent and extending the hours of the clinic.
In only 9 months, the Efficiency Board had undertaken 400 projects, all with the goal of better service, better value and better management. Efficiency was truly on the agenda. Even more problems could be solved with the cooperation of Member States. He had seen an illustration of this fact only this morning. The Secretary-General had arrived at this morning's
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meeting promptly at 10 a.m., but Member States had only drifted in. Some $875,000 would be lost every year if each New York meeting started only ten minutes late.
He had great admiration for efforts undertaken by the Economic Commission for Africa, he said. That agency had taken nine programmes that were not well focused and reduced them down to five. In the Economic Commission for Europe, Member States were asked to specify the most valuable 20 per cent of programmes, and the least valuable 20 per cent. Resources from the least valuable programmes could be focused higher up the list of priorities.
Phase I of the effort was now winding down, he said. The challenge now was to get managers to complete the other 77 per cent of the 400 efficiency projects. The Board was now ready to launch reviews of cross-cutting programmes -- publications, travel, internal reports, human resource activities and financial activities. A second report would be issued in December 1996.
The vision of the future was for a mission-driven and results-oriented Organization with specific goals and enhanced performance. The Board hoped to see the creation of a new management culture which empowered managers through the streamlining of administrative procedures, delegation and decentralization. Clearly, there were problems with insufficiently focused programmes. The Organization was too "process-driven" rather than "results- driven". There were complex processes and rules that needed simplification. "Value for money" must be the primary criterion for resource decisions, he said.
A correspondent asked Mr. Connor if he had any desire to put forward his candidacy for Secretary-General. He said that he had no such aspirations. He enjoyed working at the United Nations and hoped to bring something of his background to its work. The Efficiency Board was the Secretary-General's idea, he said, not his. One year ago the Secretary-General had set out his plans in an address at Yale University. It had been hard work, he said, but it had also been "a lot of fun".
Another correspondent noted that the report of the Efficiency Board had indicated that the Organization had achieved a 27 per cent reduction in the use of paper at Headquarters. How much money had that effort saved?
Mr. Connor said that he had not been able to calculate exactly what had been the savings achieved by the various actions. The Efficiency Board had attempted in the report to look at things in their totality. People had begun to think about the slimming processes initiated by the Board. As an example, he said that of the five stages of a United Nations document -- the request from Member States; planning, coordination and preparation; research, writing and review; translation and editing; dissemination; and the distribution to
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other audiences -- the most savings could be achieved by the first step. The process had to begin by considering precisely what was needed by the General Assembly and other inter-governmental bodies, he said.
As the system now worked, documents were written as if no one had ever heard of the projects before. That was because Governments had different staff at the United Nations and in their capitals. As a practical matter, that system meant that authors reproduced the information of previous years, and added new information to it. Document retrieval on the Internet was total, he stressed. Documents should be written in a way that combined Internet retrieval of the history of a matter under consideration with a focus on new aspects of the issue to be decided. That first step would substantially reduce the problem.
One participant in the work of the Efficiency Board -- the Deputy Defense Minister of Singapore -- had told him that cabinet papers in his Government were limited to two pages in length. That was focus. He didn't want to push programme managers to tell him how much each individual change had saved. That may kill the incentive for additional innovation. What he wanted to do was imbed a process, so that managers would think constantly of value, service, timeliness and improved systems.
Travel was important in an international organization such as the United Nations, a correspondent said. Was there any way to put a dollar figure to savings achieved in that area? Mr. Connor said that percentage reductions in travel costs were in the "double digits". The Organization did not always consider whether or not travel was necessary. His video-conference this morning with permanent representatives in New York, Geneva and Vienna, for example, had cost only $2,000. The Security Council, for example, could meet with senior officials through video-conferencing with complete security, he said. If officials were needed to brief the Security Council on essential matters under its consideration, they were always available.
Travel was not necessary in all circumstances, but people needed to be made comfortable with new and inexpensive technologies such as video- conferencing which replaced it. He had presented his budget outline to several different groups in Geneva and elsewhere totally by video- conferencing, he said. Live transmission with no lag-time was achievable, he said. "It's worth pursuing, because it really is cheap", he said.
Had a cost-benefit analysis been undertaken on the offer of the Government of Germany regarding office space in Bonn which could be used to house agencies currently resident in Geneva? Also, wouldn't reductions in general service staff levels result in professional staff occupying themselves with clerical functions, wasting money in the long run?
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Mr. Connor said that no cost-benefit analysis had yet been undertaken regarding office space in Bonn. He had not been asked to undertake such an analysis. To the question on the downsizing of clerical staff, he said "Oh, you're so wrong". There were many Assistant Secretaries-General and Under- Secretaries-General who prepared their own memoranda on computers. They wanted to achieve a one-to-one ratio for professional staff members to computers. There were approximately 1,000 secretarial positions among the 6,000 authorized posts. That number had been reduced largely by the application of new technology, as opposed to simple cost-cutting. He had produced his presentation to the noon briefing himself, he said. The working world had changed, he said. "There will be some empty desks". More professional posts had been downsized than general service posts, he added.
A correspondent noted that he could not find the word "quality" anywhere in the report of the Efficiency Board. Would simple cost-cutting improve the quality of work performed by the Organization? He said the objective was to provide quality: better value -- a first-rate product at lower cost. There was a market for the work that the United Nations performed, Mr. Connor said. The United Nations could do a better job at producing documentation and storing it on the Internet. If the Internet was used in the production of reports, collaboration with different offices, research institutes and universities would improve the quality of work demonstrably. If the best tools were put in the hands of United Nations staff, quality of work would go up, not down.
How many members of the Efficiency Board actively used the Internet? a correspondent asked. Mr. Connor said that the "marvels of the Internet" had been displayed to the Efficiency Board members. Some two or three members were fairly familiar with the technology, and the rest had been convinced of its utility. "They ate it up", he said. He wasn't here to sell technology; he was here to sell services to Member States.
A correspondent in Geneva then asked Mr. Connor whether or not the General Assembly would undertake a special session on management issues. What had happened to that idea? Mr. Connor said that the special session that had been talked about had been conceived in connection with the financial situation of the Organization. He had briefed the Assembly's Fifth Committee on that subject last Friday. "We're heading toward negative $240 million in the regular budget account by the end of December", he said. It was hoped that troop and equipment debt could be paid down to some $600 to $700 million. The need to improve the financial situation of the Organization had not gone away. But at this point, he was waiting for the results of a high-level group, not a special session.
Was the report of the Efficiency Board evidence that the United Nations had not been managed properly before? Mr. Connor said that in a similar project, the United States Government had downsized by 10 per cent, reducing its staff by 275,000, in only three or four years. The United Nations was "in
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sync" with the efforts of different Governments such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and others that were taking a different look at how they did things. The United Nations was progressing.
A correspondent said that Mr. Connor had once referred to the cash-flow problems of the United Nations as a "ponzi scheme". Was that still the case? He answered that the problems still existed. The United Nations was still borrowing money from its peace-keeping accounts. At the end of this year, it would borrow a total of $243 million from peace-keeping, up from $199 million borrowed last year. It was a very worrisome situation, particularly given that peace-keeping funding was being reduced. Only some $1.2 billion would be assessed for peace-keeping this year because the number of missions was being reduced. The "piggy bank" was diminishing, he said.
Was he now prepared to report on United Nations efficiency to the United States Congress? a correspondent asked. He said that he had spoken to some key representatives and senators, and their staffs, and would continue to do so. He was now telling all Governments -- including the United States Congress -- what the United Nations had achieved and what it had promised to achieve in the future. The United Nations was facing many changes in direction, he said. Technology was changing, and re-engineering and simplifying processes was part of that. The changes were not finished. "Change management is going on all over the world", he said. "We have a lot to do, and so does everybody else."
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